Tonight I received an e-mail message from Classmates.com that said I had a new e-mail message waiting. Curious, I logged into the site, which I've been registered on for more than a decade, only to find that in order to read the message (which btw, was sent back in November!) I would need to upgrade to the "gold" subscription package. I went to my friend's page, because the message was from someone I really want to catch up with, and composed a message to her. When I hit submit, I learned that for my friend to be able to read my message, I would have to pay (or I could have her pay.)



Presumably, this means that at least one party in an e-mail exchange on the site needs to be "gold." I don't know if this is a recent thing, or if folks who've sent me messages in the past were subscribers.



For a site to call itself a "leading online social networking service" to hold communication among members hostage this way does not make sense to me in 2008, given all of the other social networking options that now exist.



While the revenues from the 3 million "pay accounts" from the subscribers to the social networking sites under the banner of Classmates Media Services is a significant figure even if each subscriber only went "gold" for one month, more telling is the statistic that there are 50 million registered users of the sites. This means that only 6% of registered users use the pay features of the sites.



Given the amount of advertising on the site, Wonder what the traffic and revenue numbers would look like should it decide to allow users to communicate freely?

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